Category Archives: technology

Apart from working on my Data Worlds book, one of the things that I’ve been doing as part of my Prize Fellowship at the University of Bath is working to set up a new trans-national, trans-institutional Public Data Lab. I’m delighted to announce that Sage Publishing have recently committed to supporting the lab to help […]

What is the role of software programming in the social sciences? My colleague Phillip Brooker (University of Bath) and I have recently been working together to set up a new initiative to advance both critical reflection and what Philip Agre describes as “critical technical practice” around programming in the context of the social sciences. If […]

The following piece was originally published in Open Democracy to coincide with the release of a new research report co-authored with Alex Cobham (Chief Executive, Tax Justice Network) and Richard Murphy (City, University of London) looking at the current state and future prospects of a global public database of corporate accounts. It was also cross-posted on the Tax Justice Network […]

Yesterday I gave a presentation on “Ways of Seeing Data” at the Digital Methods Winter School Mini-Conference at the University of Amsterdam. The presentation was based on a forthcoming publication co-authored with Liliana Bounegru, Stefania Milan and Paolo Ciuccarelli in which we propose a heuristic framework for advancing critical literacies to read, understand, create and […]

I’m part of a new research project called DATACTIVE: The Politics of Data According to Civil Society at the University of Amsterdam. The project is funded by the European Research Council and led by Stefania Milan who specialises in the study of social movements and their technologies. The three main research questions of the project […]

Today I gave a talk titled “How is Data Made? From Dataset Literacy to Data Infrastructure Literacy” as part of the Data Literacy Workshop at ACM Web Science 2015 hosted at the University of Oxford. Drawing on a comparison between data and photography that I made in an article for the Guardian several years ago, […]

Today I’m giving a working paper exploring a politics of public information that goes beyond a focus on the disclosure of datasets and looks towards interventions into the data infrastructures through which they are produced. The paper was co-authored with Tim Davies at the University of Southampton and will be delivered at the Open Data […]

Following are the slides for the talk that Liliana Bounegru and I gave on “Mapping Issues with the Web: An Introduction to Digital Methods” at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University. Leading sociologist Bruno Latour acted as respondent for the talk, and joined us for subsequent discussion. A video recording from the talk […]

A few years ago I used to work at several college and departmental libraries at the University of Cambridge. One of the tasks which library staff regularly had to undertake was to cross reference the latest copies of all relevant reading lists with their collections, to ensure that they had copies of all the books […]

Work is now underway on OpenPhilosophy.org, a website that will enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create bibliographies of public domain philosophy texts. Today we did some basic mockups for what different pages on the site might look like. Here’s a quick look.